IBC notebook

IBC highlights this year include 3D LCD screens from Philips that are truly "almost ready for prime time" (no glasses!), holographic storage that puts over 300-Gbytes on a 5-inch disc (and Ikegami, with no legacy tape format loyalty, is the first to offer it), and NHK's ultra high speed camera demo that shoots one million frames per second.

IBC highlights this year include 3D LCD screens from Philips that are truly "almost ready for prime time" (no glasses!), holographic storage that puts over 300-Gbytes on a 5-inch disc (and Ikegami, with no legacy tape format loyalty, is the first to offer it), and NHK's ultra high speed camera demo that shoots one million frames per second.

The convention seems bigger and more crowded, and though Europe may seem technologically ahead of the U.S. in many ways, HDTV still appears behind. Microsoft is here in a fairly big way, and they've launched the Silverlight "Flash-replacement" technology (my phrasing, not theirs).

There's a free-spirited flavor to this convention, a bit more than in the U.S., and I think it's specifically because of the mixing of broadcast-TV, cable-TV, satellite-TV, IPTV, and mobile-TV.

IBC, like DVD, is a non-acronym that used to stand for International Broadcasters Convention, or something like that, until they officially discontinued any acronymic meaning. It's like a European NAB, except that cable and satellite and everyone else are invited to the party in a big way. IPTV has a special area, as does mobile-TV.

IBC is almost over but I still need to make my way to an EBU demo that compares, objectively, the various parameters of frame rates and resolution -- many here still seem to be making up their minds, though in the 720p vs. 1080i war a consensus around 720p appears to be building. More on that later, as well as articles in upcoming weeks on many of the newest, most innovative video technologies here.